Curator's Note: The content of this article was originally written by Raman Chawla over at the Cloud Velocity blog.

First, I would like to thank all those who signed up for the beta trial and tried our Cloud Cloning product. A special thanks to all those users who after trying the beta software provided valuable comments and suggestions. All of the user input has resulted in several usability improvements. In this post, I would also like to announce that we have added support for Amazon Linux as requested by the users. This will help all those folks who want to try out the Cloud Cloning product on a system that is already running in AWS, or who really want to quickly spin up a system in AWS to try out its advanced capabilities.

The CloudVelocity Cloud Cloning product is very easy to use. Once you sign up, you receive an email to confirm that you are indeed the one who signed up. Upon confirmation of the email address, CloudVelocity activates your account and you are directed to the login page. When you log in for the first time to the Cloud Cloning Services management console, you are taken to the download page. You can download the Cloud Cloning Services software by picking the right flavor of OS that your system is running – the system that you want to clone in the AWS cloud – as shown in the screenshots below. The system could be a physical machine or a virtual one – CloudVelocity works for both systems.

Choose your flavor of Linux

Choose your flavor of Windows

Once the software is installed on the system, the system starts communicating with the CloudVelocity’s Cloning Services and you are prompted to go back to the Cloud Cloning Services management console. On the dashboard you can see the status of the system on which you have installed the CloudVelocity software, as “Connected”; the system has already started to synchronize the underlying OS, libraries and binaries needed to run the application seamlessly as seen in the following screenshot.

Cloning Services Dashboard

The management console also shows the status of the Cloud Cloning Services so that you know if the service is available. Occasionally, the service status shows up as “Not Running,” or an intermediate state, “Cloud service temporarily unavailable” – this happens when the Services are under maintenance or in the process of coming up, and you are advised to try back at a later time.

You can clone a multi-tier setup that makes up the application cluster. The systems on which the Cloud Cloning software is installed fall in the default application category and they show up under the “All Systems” application on the Cloning tab of the management console. You can simply clone the “All Systems” application. You can create a custom application by dragging and dropping systems that participate in an application. A system is ready to be cloned if the system has completely synchronized with cloud services and the status shows up as “Ready to be cloned.” You cannot edit or delete the default “All Systems” application. However, a custom application can be edited and you can delete it as well and create a new application as needed.

Here I am going to illustrate creating two custom applications that I want to clone in the cloud. I am running two applications in my local environment – WordPress and SugarCRM. I downloaded the CloudVelocity Cloning service software on the 4 servers that make up WordPress application and 2 servers that make up the SugarCRM application. Once the software is installed, all six systems show up under the “All Systems” application as below:

The “All Systems” Application

Now, I am going to create a custom application by clicking on “Add new application” button on the cloning page. At this point, I am presented a page where I name this application and drag and drop the right systems that constitute that application.

Configure New Application

I created two custom applications “Wordpress” and “SugarCRM,” as you see in the following two screenshots.

The new “WordPress” application

The new “SugarCRM” application

After creating the custom applications, the cloning page looks like following screenshot.

Cloning Dashboard

I can now clone either the “Wordpress” or “SugarCRM” application. When you hit the clone button, CloudVelocity’s Cloud Cloning Service starts a clone of the system in the AWS cloud. Once the cloned system is up and running, it gets an external IP address that you can use to connect to it. You use the same credentials to log in to the cloned instance as you would to connect to the system running in the local premises. If the cloned application cluster is running a web application, the web services will be available seamlessly. The user can use the external IP address of the system on the browser to get the web services the same way as he would do for the systems that he was using prior to cloning using their IP address or the DNS name.

For this illustration, I pressed the “clone” button for the “SugarCRM” application. In less than 5 minutes, my “SugarCRM” application was available in AWS cloud as you can see in the following screenshot, and I verified it by accessing the application using the External IP address in the browser that the SugarCRM-sever got assigned.

SugarCRM application running in the cloud

You can run only one clone operation at any given time during this beta trial period.. If you want to try out CloudVelocity’s product with multiple concurrent clones, I would encourage you to contact CloudVelocity to try out the Cloud Continuity Edition or send a request to allow multiple concurrent clones on the Cloud Cloning Edition product.

You can see it is very easy to create clones of your existing multi-tier applications in AWS with the CloudVelocity solution. Give it a try at cloning.cloudvelocity.com.